


Reflection of Stars

by dargonpoops



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Destiny Islands (Kingdom Hearts), Drabble, F/F, Mild Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, Post-Kingdom Hearts III, Short One Shot, dreams and drawings and seashells, late night beach strolls and star gazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:41:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28931937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dargonpoops/pseuds/dargonpoops
Summary: Sometimes wounds don’t heal on their own. But beneath the stars, by the sea, hand in Namine’s, Xion learns to let go.
Relationships: Naminé/Xion (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Reflection of Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saltycryptious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltycryptious/gifts), [Creatife_Clownderer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Creatife_Clownderer/gifts).



“Namine.”

Namine awoke, drowsily. She had not quite been asleep, yet, but a haze groped for her mind. 

She blinked at her open window. The salty breeze sharpened her senses. “Xion?”

The silhouette of a young girl against a dark sea of stars, like a dancing halo wrapping around her head. Xion leaned further into Namine’s bedroom, and if not for the wind, the squeak of the windowsill might have bent Namine’s worries over her sleeping parents.

“Come with me.”

The hand of a young girl silhouetted against the moonlight draping over white curtains. Namine reached for it, hesitant only for the goosebumps already prickling across her skin, but she ignored them and followed Xion out the window and onto the soft grass beneath it. 

The sky was open to the galaxies above them, bright enough to set the quiet seaside town aglow. Namine’s feet were cold, but she was used to this; she was sure Xion’s were as well. But her hands were warm. And Namine knew Xion’s were as well. Their fingers locked tighter together, and they walked against the breeze to the shore. 

At night, the sand always felt like a cool, soft cushion. The underside of a pillow when flipped over. The side of the bed untouched by body heat. It was a welcome presence from the cold concrete of the streets. 

Namine and Xion paused, and took simultaneous deep breaths. They burst into laughter. 

“You look sleepy,” Xion noted. She lightly tugged Namine’s hand, and together they drifted to the sea-line. Where water met earth and mixed into what Namine always associated with pudding—soft and forgiving, but still stubborn in its shape. 

“What do you mean?” Namine asked through an elongated yawn. “I’m wide awake.”

Xion pushed against Namine’s shoulder, and smiled merrily. “Sorry.”

Namine returned the smile. Xion wasn’t sorry, but neither was she. 

The waves and the stars glittered in all different directions. It was disorienting to look at, but without vertigo—more like the pleasant spin of oncoming slumber, when the hardness of reality melts into something more malleable.

“I wanted to take you here,” Xion said, and Namine listened to her quietly. Xion tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear, only for it to escape with the wind. Namine reached over and set it back in place. It held. 

“Couldn’t sleep again?” Namine asked gently.

Xion nodded, nearly imperceptible. She molded her face into a weary smile, and turned it to the horizon. Namine followed. 

“I wanted you to see how beautiful it is.” There was a reverence in the way Xion absorbed the sea and the stars and the sand beneath their feet. Namine felt that reverence too, almost always; she expressed it through art, in a sacred act of gratitude.

Xion did not convey it through art the way Namine had learned to. The world knew Xion loved it because when Xion loved something, her entire being wrapped around it. In that moment, Xion allowed herself to be one with the sea and the stars and the sand, to paint herself into their expanse.

Namine, hand still in Xion’s, watched everything become one thing. The moon’s reflection dotted the surface with twinkling lights that blended into the stars. All around them, the sand glittered, too; scattered across its soft sheen were pinpricks of light. Xion’s feet had sunken into the sand, and she bent down towards it. 

When she stood, her fingers shimmered with sand and, clasped gently between her finger and thumb, a small seashell.

“Here,” Xion said, and raised Namine’s hand. As if it were the most delicate object in this great expanse, she placed it into Namine’s palm. 

As Namine tilted her hand this way and that, the moonlight danced back and forth across the shell. Beside her, Xion sifted through the sand, venturing closer to the waves where the water softened the task. 

Here, Xion was in her true element. She became one with what she loved not to lose herself in it, but to understand it. To accept it. And to be understood and accepted in return.

Whatever emotions her dreams left her behind with, Xion was letting the waves wash them away as she freed shells from the sand layered on top of them. 

“What were they? The dreams,” Namine said. Xion turned to her, and placed more shells into Namine’s cupped palms. “Same as usual?”

“Mostly.” Images of treacherous shadows, of tall cityscapes full of dead ends and sickly pale lights. A tower so steep simply looking down put your stomach in your throat. Namine had drawn them all, so Xion could look at the images and think, _I can shape this, if I just try._ “There was a new one tonight.”

Three more shells dropped into Namine’s hands. She counted them. Ten in total, impressively consistent, all sisters of the same womb. Each had a delicate pointed tip and expanded outward in the shape of a flower petal. 

“What was it about?” Namine knelt down on the sand next to a small pool of tide water, and rinsed the shells clean. Xion watched as she did so, and knelt beside her. The sand shifted beneath their knees, shifted the outline of the tide pool. 

“I...” Xion trailed off, absently tracing formless figures on the sand with a shard of seaglass. “It was like I was a million things all at once. And I couldn’t decide which thing I was, so I kept changing and changing. So fast.”

Namine watched Xion as she spoke, her outline clearer against the night sky from this angle. The moon hung in the air behind her, sinking towards the waves with a drowsy lull. 

“Would you like me to draw it? We can go back,” Namine offered. The trip back to her room would be fairly brief, but Xion shook her head. “What did you turn into?”

Xion hummed in a pitch almost matching the breeze. “A lot of things. Sometimes myself, sometimes other people that I know or don’t know. A few times, I turned into a seashell,” she said, and drew a petal-shaped seashell in the sand. “Other times, I turned into a monster, or something. None of it felt very good.”

Namine separated the shells into two halves, and held them out to Xion. Ever so carefully, Xion accepted her five, and placed the shard of glass into Namine’s empty hand. Namine held it between her fingers, and carved out shapes into the damp canvas before her. 

Towers. Shells. A city. Wavering inhuman figures. A large key. She drew them as Xion listed them out, one atop the other, until eventually the lines ran into each other so much that they could not be distinguished as individuals. The sand was a jagged mess, and she and Xion stared at the shadows it cast upon itself. The waves crashed quietly onto the shore and crawled towards them. 

“Yeah,” was all Xion said. She stared at the seashells in her hand, drying in the wind. 

Namine leaned forward and drew a large circle enveloping the mass of lines. Beneath it, she wrote in large, firm letters:

XION

Xion looked at it, then at her. 

“No matter what,” Namine said, “you are still you. Right?”

Xion tipped her head sideways. “Maybe. It didn’t feel like it in my dream.”

“Sometimes dreams tell us what we don’t know, but should.” She underlined Xion’s name. “You kept turning into so many things, that you were worried you had lost yourself.”

At this, Xion nodded. Her shoulders relaxed, and she rearranged the shells in her hand. Namine watched her align them all with their tips pointing outward, radiating from the center of her palm in the shape of a star.

“Maybe,” Xion mused, “next time I’ll try not to worry.” Her hair came loose from her ear again, and she tucked it back. It stayed. “But I don’t really know how.”

Namine stared at her own shells in thought. Though each one was similar, they each had subtle grooves of their own, areas of coloration shared with no other. And though each one was different, they were all still shells. And though the sand was not a shell, it still had shells within it. And though the ocean was not a shell or sand, it had both within it. And though the sky was not the ocean, it still became one with it when the horizon smudged into nothing. 

“Instead of turning into different things,” Namine said; “turn those different things into you.”

A hiss of sea foam floated towards them. A thin sheet of water laid itself on top of the circle of scribbles that were Xion, and when the foam receded, it brought the drawing with it. All that was left was:

XION

Namine took a seashell between her fingers and laid it out flat in the now bare sand. And she took another, another, and arranged her five shells so each tip was pointing outward, radiating out from each other. 

Xion took her shells and laid hers in the same way, next to Namine’s. Two newly made stars, glinting in the light of the sky and the sea. 

Namine took the shard of sea glass, and drew a circle around their stars. And, next to Xion’s name, wrote: 

NAMINE

They stood and watched, hand in hand, as the ocean reached up to meet them.

**Author's Note:**

> a (very) short drabble that ive been meaning to post for a while now, bc i haven’t finished anything in years despite all my ideas and attempts and its about time i get back into the swing of things 
> 
> based on a prompt from my dear friends to whom i gift this work to


End file.
